Sphinx

The pistol that made Sphinx's name was not a Sphinx design. It began as the ITM AT-84, a licensed Swiss-built copy of the Czechoslovakian CZ 75, announced in 1984. What Sphinx did with that inheritance is the story. When the company took over ITM's pistol work at the end of the 1980s, it kept the CZ 75 architecture, the low bore axis and the all-steel double-action layout, and then re-engineered nearly everything around it. Assembly tolerances and finish were tightened to the point that the resulting AT2000 no longer accepted a Czech CZ 75 barrel, and the design came to be treated as independent rather than derivative.

That approach was possible because Sphinx was a machining firm before it was a gunmaker. The company traces its origins to 1876 in Solothurn, where it began as a manufacturer of steel products such as screws and precision parts, and it spent a century building exactly the kind of tooling and die-casting competence that pistol slides and frames demand. Firearms came later, in the 1980s, when the firm diversified beyond pure toolmaking and acquired the remains of ITM, whose AT-84 and AT-88 pistols provided the starting pattern.

The custom-shop era that followed is what collectors care about most. The 2000 series, produced from around 1990, carried over the AT-88's firing pin safety and revised barrel lockup, and was offered in full-size, Police Special and compact configurations alongside dedicated competition models. Slides were machined from solid steel billets, frames from castings, forgings, or billets, and each pistol was hand-fitted to tight tolerances rather than mass-produced. Custom-built pistols shipped with an actual fired test target confirming that specific gun's accuracy. The later 3000 series pushed further: a fully CNC-machined combat and sport pistol offered in stainless steel, aluminium and titanium, with an accessory rail, low bore line and a wide menu of safety systems, sights, sizes and finishes. In practical shooting circles overseas, the 3000 became a fixture, to the point that its eventual discontinuation left competitors turning to custom shops that tune CZs instead.

Hand-fitting at Swiss labor rates is a difficult business, and the ownership history reflects it. On 12 November 2010, Sphinx was acquired by the KRISS Arms Group, which redirected the company toward a product it had never built before: a production pistol. The SDP entered production in 2012 as Sphinx's first mass-produced firearm, cutting the price by more than two-thirds, with the Compact Alpha reaching the American market in early 2013 and further Compact, SubCompact and Standard variants following through 2014 and 2015. The SDP kept the DA/SA lockwork and low-bore axis of its predecessors on an aluminum upper frame with a polymer grip module, and found institutional users at home: the cantonal police of Obwalden adopted the SDP Compact.

The end came quickly. Sphinx Systems AG was declared bankrupt on 30 November 2015, and the company went out of business in July 2016, with a Swiss Federal Council ban on supplying weapon parts to the Arab region cited as a primary cause; KRISS USA, an independently operated subsidiary of the KRISS Group, took over production and support activities. For the collector, that closure is precisely the point. Swiss-made Sphinx pistols, particularly the hand-fitted 2000 and 3000 series guns imported in modest numbers, are a finite population. They represent one of the few sustained attempts to take a proven service pistol design and manufacture it without regard to what the market would ordinarily pay, and the market has been repricing them accordingly since the factory doors closed.